Archaeologists from the Russian Academy
of Sciences, who excavated the site, discovered a rather strange tooth. It is
bigger than any modern human tooth. And even stranger, it is also bigger than a
Neanderthal tooth! It seems from this deduction, that this new breed were much
larger than modern humans and their Neanderthal counterparts!

So is this the giant of myth and legend?
Have we at last found real evidence of human like creatures that roamed the
earth before and during mans first steps? More importantly, is this where we get
our memories of giants roaming the earth, which in fact were even mentioned in
the bible?

George Washington University Richmond,
airs on the side of caution. They stated that: 'The tooth size isn't always a good
indicator of body size. A Hominin can have big teeth and not be a giant'.

Denisova
Cave Entrance

It seems that we won't know for at least
a while whether it really is a completely separate species, or a branch of
modern man. At the moment scientists seem to be leaning towards the separate
species idea. Just because the DNA is similar to modern humans, doesn't mean
that we did interbreed with them. We shall have to wait and see. Their theory is
that if they are a seperate species then modern man could not have mated and
produced children. But are we certain of that? If the genetics are similar, then
surely there is a possibility that we could.

Archaeology and science have a long way
to go to figure out exactly how modern man evolved, and who we are related to.

From the depths of time, prehistoric man
still holds it's secrets. How many more amazing discoveries will we find?.

Dennisovan New York Times

Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern
Cousins, DNA Reveals

Published: December 22, 2010

An
international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group
known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from
roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s
inhabitants of New Guinea.

The entire genome of the Denisovans was
extracted from a tooth and finger bone.

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All the Denisovans have left behind are a
broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists
have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these
scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA,
published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New
Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

An earlier, incomplete analysis of
Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals
and humans.
On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of
Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The
Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The
Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans
expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their
DNA to them.

“It’s
an incredibly exciting finding,” said Carlos Bustamante, a Stanford University
geneticist who was not involved in the research.

The research was led by Svante Paabo, a
geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig,
Germany. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have pioneered methods for rescuing
fragments of ancient DNA from fossils and stitching them together. In May, for
example, they published a complete Neanderthal
genome.

The stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals
left a fossil record stretching from about 240,000 to 30,000 years ago in
Europe, the Near East and Russia. Analyzing the Neanderthal genome, Dr. Paabo
and his colleagues concluded that humans and Neanderthals descended from common
ancestors that lived 600,000 years ago.

But the scientists also found that 2.5
percent of the Neanderthal genome is more similar to the DNA of living Europeans
and Asians than to African DNA. From this evidence they concluded that
Neanderthals interbred with humans soon after they emerged from Africa roughly
50,000 years ago.

Dr. Paabo’s success with European
Neanderthal fossils inspired him and his colleagues to look farther afield. They
began to work with Anatoli Derevianko of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who
explores Siberian caves in search of fossils of hominins (species more closely
related to living humans than to chimpanzees, our closest living relatives).

Last year, Dr. Derevianko and his
colleagues sent Dr. Paabo a nondescript fragment of a finger bone from a cave
called Denisova. Dr. Derevianko thought that the fossil, which is at least
50,000 years old, might have belonged to one of the earliest humans to live in
Siberia.

Dr. Paabo and his colleagues isolated a
small bundle of DNA from the bone’s mitochondria, the energy-generating
structures within our cells. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues were surprised to
discover that the Denisova DNA was markedly different from that of either humans
or Neanderthals. “It was a great shock to us that it was distinct from those
groups,” Dr. Paabo said in an interview.

Dr. Paabo and his colleagues immediately
set about to collect all the DNA in the Denisova finger bone. Once they had
sequenced its genome, they sent the data to researchers at Harvard Medical
School and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., to compare with other
species.

The Massachusetts scientists concluded
that the finger bone belonged to a hominin branch that split from the ancestors
of Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years ago. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have
named this lineage the Denisovans.

Next, the researchers looked for evidence
of interbreeding. Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute geneticist, compared the
Denisovan genome to the complete genomes of five people, from South Africa,
Nigeria, China, France and Papua New Guinea. To his astonishment, a sizable
chunk of the Denisova genome resembled parts of the New Guinea DNA.

“The
correct reaction when you get a surprising result is, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ”
said Dr. Patterson. To see if the result was an error, he and his colleagues
sequenced the genomes of seven more people, including another individual from
New Guinea and one from the neighboring island of Bougainville. But even in the
new analysis, the Denisovan DNA still turned up in the New Guinea and
Bougainville genomes.

If the Denisovans did indeed have a range
spreading from Siberia to South Asia, they must have been a remarkably
successful kind of human. And yet, despite having the entire genome of a
Denisovan, Dr. Paabo cannot say much yet about what they were like. “By
sequencing my complete genome, there’s very little you could predict about what
I look like or how I behave,” he said.

One solid clue to what the Denisovans
looked like emerged in January. Dr. Paabo and his team had flown to Novosibirsk
to share their initial results with Dr. Derevianko. Dr. Derevianko then
presented them with a wisdom tooth from Denisova.

Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist in the
Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary
Anthropology, who was at the meeting, was flummoxed. “I looked at it and said,
‘Ah, O.K., this is not a modern human, and it’s definitely not a Neanderthal,”’
said Dr. Viola. “It was just so clear.”

The tooth had oddly bulging sides, for
one thing, and for another, its large roots flared out to the sides. Back in
Germany, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues managed to extract some mitochondrial DNA
from the tooth. It proved to be a nearly perfect match to that of the Denisova
finger bone.

That match offers some hope that if
researchers can find the same kind of tooth on a fossil skull, or perhaps even a
complete skeleton, they’ll be able to see what these ghostly cousins and
ancestors looked like in real life.

Dr. Bustamante also thinks that other
cases of interbreeding are yet to be discovered. “There’s a lot of possibility
out there,” he said. “But the only way to get at them is to sequence more of
these ancient genomes.”

Morphology and interpretations

Reconstruction of Homo
heidelbergensis

Both H. antecessor and
H. heidelbergensis are likely to be descended from the morphologically
very similar Homo ergaster from
Africa. But because H. heidelbergensis had a larger brain-case — with a
typical cranial volume of 1100–1400 cm³ overlapping the 1350 cm³ average of
modern humans — and had more advanced tools and behavior, it has been given a
separate species classification. The species was tall, 1.8 m (6 ft) on average,
and more muscular than modern humans. According to Professor Lee R. Berger of
the University of Witwatersrand,
numerous fossil bones indicate some populations of Heidelbergensis were "giants"
routinely over 2.13 m (7 ft) tall and inhabited South Africa between 0.5 million
and 300,000 years ago.[3]

Social behavior

In theory
recent findings in Atapuerca (Spain)
also suggest that H. heidelbergensis may have been the first species of
the Homo genus to bury their dead, even
offering gifts.

Some
experts[4]
believe that H. heidelbergensis, like its descendant H.
neanderthalensis, acquired a primitive form of language.
No forms of art or sophisticated artifacts other than stone tools have been
uncovered, although red ochre, a mineral that
can be used to create a red pigment which is useful as a paint, has been found
at Terra Amata excavations in
the south of France.

Language

The
morphology of the outer and middle ear suggests they had an auditory sensitivity
similar to modern humans and very different from chimpanzees. They were
probably able to differentiate between many different sounds.[5]
Dental wear analysis suggests they were as likely to be right handed as modern
people.[6]

H.
heidelbergensis was a close relative (most probably a migratory descendant)
of Homo ergaster. H.
ergaster is thought to be the first hominin to vocalize[7]
and that as H. heidelbergensis developed more sophisticated culture
proceeded from this point.

Evidence of hunting

A number of
400,000-year-old wooden projectile spears were found at Schöningen in northern
Germany. These are thought to have been made by H. erectus or H.
heidelbergensis. Generally, projectile weapons are more commonly associated
with H. sapiens. The lack of projectile weaponry is an indication of
different sustenance methods, rather than inferior technology or abilities. The
situation is identical to that of native New Zealand Māori, modern H.
sapiens, who also rarely threw objects, but used spears and clubs instead.[8]

Divergent evolution

Because of
the radiation of H. heidelbergensis out of Africa and into Europe, the
two populations were mostly isolated during the Wolstonian Stage and
Ipswichian Stage, the last
of the prolonged Quaternaryglacial periods.
Neanderthals diverged from H. heidelbergensis probably some 300,000 years
ago in Europe, during the Wolstonian Stage; H. sapiens probably diverged
between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa. Such fossils as the Atapuerca skull
and the Kabwe skull bear witness
to the two branches of the H. heidelbergensis tree.

Homo
neanderthalensis retained most of the features of H. heidelbergensis
after its divergent evolution. Though shorter, Neanderthals were more robust,
had large brow-ridges, a slightly protruding face and lack of prominent chin.
They also had a larger brain than all other hominins. Homo sapiens, on
the other hand, have the smallest brows of any known hominin, are tall and
lanky, and have a flat face with a protruding chin. H. sapiens have a
larger brain than H. heidelbergensis, and a smaller brain than H.
neanderthalensis, on average. To date, H. sapiens is the only known
hominin with a high forehead, flat face, and thin, flat brows.

Some
believe that H. heidelbergensis is a distinct species, and some that it
is a cladistic ancestor to other Homo forms sometimes improperly linked
to distinct species in terms of populational genetics.

Discovery

The first
fossil discovery of this species was made on October 21, 1907, and came from
Mauer where the workman
Daniel Hartmann spotted a jaw in a sandpit. The jaw (Mauer
1) was in good condition except for the
missing premolar teeth, which were eventually found near the jaw. The workman
gave it to Professor Otto Schoetensack from the
University of Heidelberg,
who identified and named the fossil.

Boxgrove Man

In 1994
British scientists
unearthed a lower hominin tibia bone just a few miles away from the English Channel, along
with hundreds of ancient hand axes, at the Boxgrove Quarry site. A
partial leg bone is dated to between 478,000 and 524,000 years old. H.
heidelbergensis was the early proto-human species that occupied both France and Great Britain at that
time; both locales were connected by a landmass during that epoch. Prior to Gran Dolina, Boxgrove
offered the earliest hominid occupants in Europe.

The tibia
had been gnawed by a large carnivore, suggesting that he had been killed by a
lion or wolf or that his unburied corpse had been scavenged after death.[10]

Sima de los Huesos

Beginning
in 1992, a Spanish team has located
more than 5,500 human bones dated to an age of at least 350,000 years in the
Sima de los Huesos site in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern
Spain. The pit contains fossils of perhaps 28 individuals together with remains
of Ursus deningeri and other
carnivores and a biface called Excalibur.
It is hypothesized that this Acheulean axe made of red
quartzite was some kind of ritual offering for a funeral. Ninety percent of the
known H. heidelbergensis remains have been obtained from this site. The
fossil pit bones include:

A complete
cranium (Skull 5), nicknamed Miguelón, and
fragments of other craniums, such as Skull 4, nicknamed Agamenón and
skull 6, nicknamed Rui (from El Cid, a local hero).

Indeed,
nearby sites contain the only known and controversial Homo antecessor
fossils.

Suffolk, England

In 2005
flint tools and teeth from the water vole Mimomys Savini, a key dating
species, were found in the cliffs at Pakefield near Lowestoft
in Suffolk. This suggests that hominins can be dated in England to 700,000 years
ago, potentially a cross between Homo Antecessor and Homo
Heidelbergensis

Another
artist interpretation of the Denisovan man, compared to Patty of the Patterson
Film.